New PC – Advice please

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  • #16112
    XDCFluffyBunny
    Participant

    Ok have finally decided that I need an upgrade – my pc’s old and the monitor is on its way out

    As close to £1500 + VAT (£1760) to spend
    As you can imagine I want as good a system as i can possibly get for this. Oh and theres no pretending this is for anything other than a gaming rig.

    Whats the following look like: configured from this –

    http://3xs.scan.co.uk/ShowSystem.asp?SystemID=487

    Motherboard Asus P5W DH Deluxe (crossfire board ?!!)

    Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4

    4 gig Corsair TwinX DDR2 mem (800)

    640 mb XFX 8800 GTS Extreme XXX (mem 1800, gpu 550)

    2 320gb hard disks samsung sata 300 7200rpm

    Sound Blaster X-Fi extreme (is this a big enough step up from Audigy2 ZS ?)

    Vista 32 Home Premium (?)

    22″ Iiyama PLE2200WS-B widescreen 1680 – 1050

    using old cd dvd etc to save on price !!!!

    TOTAL: £1839.86 (£1565.84)

    Bit ever budget but it was an increase in ram that did it

    Could go down to 2gig of ram for – £1690.65 (£1438.65)

    But 2 gig didn’t seem to do the card and processor justice?

    One other thing the mother board is a crossfire board sold with nvidea card. Does crossfire even work with nvidea’s if i wanted to double up in the future (which is questionable to be honest)

    As much help and advice as possible please

    #48392
    XDCsPUNKer
    Participant

    only thing I can offer is to go with a motherboard that is sli and not crossfire with regards to nvidia.
    Another thing is the offer overclockers have on this beast that would tempt me into getting an AMD instead of intel proccessor:
    http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-173-AM
    I may have to pick one of these buggers up whilst they are still on offer
    oh and Xfi is deffinatley better than audigy

    #48393
    XDC-snell
    Participant

    well make sure it come’s with a vista disc as you’ll be taking it off to put xp on, and popping it in a cupboard for a year till they get it sorted.
    You right to take the hit and get the extra ram, you’d of only ended up buying them later down the line to fill those empty slots 8)

    #48394
    XDCiNSANE
    Participant

    Only thing I will say is swap your Nvidia board for ATi Crossfire.. if you want a shit hot machine that is! 😀 R600 is out soon, so you may wanna hang on for that GFX board 🙂

    #48395
    xdc the doc
    Participant

    Hey Im no expert – but my tuppence worth as someone recently in your position….

    I did a lot of shopping around for custom built PC’s – if you want it ready built get a quote for the same stuff on..

    http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/

    I found them a lot cheaper than Scan for my rig anyway. Quick service, good info on the order process and everything worked out of the box.

    I wouldnt bother with the X-fi extreme fatality editions with the x-ram – it wont give you much boost over a cheaper x-fi from what I can tell.. strictly for peeps who wanna cream over Wendels product endorsement methinks.

    Go for neons suggestion of having a small raptor high speed disk and 1 big storage disk behind it. one for the OS and one for everything else. I did and I think it rocks!

    Core duos overclock easily – I personally dont see any utility in trying to buy bleeding edge processors with their vastly inflated prices – why not go down a model or two? Would you really notice the fps going down? i dont think so. Especially not with a wee overclock.

    The only monitor worth thinking of is the 24″Dell – thanks to Insane and Phart for persuading me to get that one….. I swear you wont regret it. Shop around and you should get it less than 500 quid.

    #48396
    XDCiNSANE
    Participant

    Go for neons suggestion of having a small raptor high speed disk and 1 big storage disk behind it. one for the OS and one for everything else. I did and I think it rocks!

    Damn right it does.. I have a Raptor for OS on me gaming PC and a Raptor for a games drive only.. shweeeeeeeetness!

    yes siree bob, the dell 24″ monitor is THE shizzle!

    #48397
    11thSignal
    Participant

    Do not bother with AMD Proc’s anymore get a Intel Core Duo they simply blow AMD’s out of the water.

    #48398
    PoD1st-BW
    Participant

    @11thSignal wrote:

    Do not bother with AMD Proc’s anymore get a Intel Core Duo they simply blow AMD’s out of the water.

    Can our techies comment on this, traditionally I tend to think AMD…….

    #48399
    xdc magicker
    Participant

    i am afraid this is true – until amd come up with a core 3 duo beater Intel is the way ahead

    the ATI r600 is due out this month!! might be worth the wait???

    #48400
    XDCOldPhart
    Participant

    @=XDC=iNSANE wrote:

    Go for neons suggestion of having a small raptor high speed disk and 1 big storage disk behind it. one for the OS and one for everything else. I did and I think it rocks!

    Damn right it does.. I have a Raptor for OS on me gaming PC and a Raptor for a games drive only.. shweeeeeeeetness!

    yes siree bob, the dell 24″ monitor is THE shizzle!

    Yup, I have a 76gb Raptopr for OS, 150gb Raptor for games, and 2 x 320gb for “Art” which I view on my 24″ Dell.

    I will tell you what mate. Why do we not look at you buying my current rig. Then you can leave the spare money for a Dell 24 “

    For £1200 I will give you

    Asus P32N SLi SE Delux mboard
    http://uk.asus.com/products4.aspx?l1=3&l2=11&l3=227&model=1280&modelmenu=1
    Core 2 Duo 2.4 ghz
    http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-128-IN
    2 gb OCZ Dual channel Gold RAM
    Arctic Colling Heatsink Fan
    http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HS-021-AR&groupid=701&catid=57&subcat=
    XFi Fatality FPS Sound
    http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=SC-032-CL&groupid=701&catid=11&subcat=
    NvidiaGeForce 8800 GTX Graphics
    OCZ 700w power supply
    http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-019-OC&groupid=701&catid=123&subcat=
    Lian Li PCA10 Case
    http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-080-LL&groupid=701&catid=7&subcat=

    For this price I will throw in my Logitech G5 Mouse, G15 keyboard and new 5.1 Logitech speakers[/url][/b]

    #48401
    xdc magicker
    Participant

    oh and with regard to the dell 24″ monitors….

    my concern would be that the native resolution of this monitor is well above 1600 / 1200….

    does this not mean that to run games at its native resolution you would need to have insanly fast gfx cards for the life of the monitor – ie as new games are released you would have to upgrade your gfx to keep these games running at > 1600 / 1200..???

    is this the case or am i just wrong???

    discuss?

    #48402
    XDCOldPhart
    Participant

    @=xdc= magicker wrote:

    oh and with regard to the dell 24″ monitors….

    my concern would be that the native resolution of this monitor is well above 1600 / 1200….

    does this not mean that to run games at its native resolution you would need to have insanly fast gfx cards for the life of the monitor – ie as new games are released you would have to upgrade your gfx to keep these games running at > 1600 / 1200..???

    is this the case or am i just wrong???

    discuss?

    Mine ran fine on 2 GeForce 7800 GTX cards and runs fine now with a single GeForce 8800GTX card, all settings on etc at 1600 / 1200

    No games I know of go above this resolution

    #48403
    XDC Erratic-Space
    Participant

    Cheers Doc for the http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/ link.

    #48404
    XDCiNSANE
    Participant

    mine runs sweet with an Ati X1900XT!

    no need for this GFX upgrade malarky you talk about 😀

    p.s. Crossfire for teh win 🙂

    #48405
    XDCsPUNKer
    Participant

    pharts offer sounds nice. And even Im enclined to admit that Ive been thinking about going over to intel even though that AMD FX proccessor I posted looks really affordable. As Doc mentioned having an Xfi you only need the basic card and not really all the trimmings but the fatality has a nice front interface thats good if you do any audio stuff as well

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